Hunker down for the story of a rallying cry for Georgia football and Florida hurricanes

As Hurricane Ian was heading toward Florida, a friend sent me a text noting that one of the networks seemed to be constantly channeling Larry Munson. Not necessarily attempting to copy his voice, but repeatedly using a phrase that for many college football fans in the South brings to mind the late University of Georgia football radio broadcaster and two words he first used 40 years ago.

Hunker down.

While going through the slow-motion wait for the hurricane, I paid more attention to this. It wasn’t just one network. It was every one and seemingly everyone. Anchors, reporters, Florida residents, the governor.

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As Ian got closer, Gov. Ron DeSantis urged those in the immediate path to “hunker down.” On NBC, anchor Lester Holt used the phrase while describing the scene in Tampa. On ABC, there was a graphic for a story that said, “Many hunker down in Orlando after fleeing coast.”

This even was one thing that CNN and Fox seemed to report quite similarly. People in Florida were hunkering down. Actually, more than just people. NPR shared a photo from Sunken Gardens in St. Petersburg of “flamingos hunkering down in a bathroom.”

I’m not exactly sure when this became such a widely used part of hurricane prep lingo – but to me it still brings to mind Georgia football and Munson.

And for the record, when it comes to the Georgia-Florida game – this year Georgia was officially the home team for their 100th meeting – I don’t have a Dog or Gator in this fight. I went to Missouri. (So to both schools I say, you’re welcome. Mizzou seems to have become the team that can find a way to not-quite win any game.)

According to historians and linguists, the term “hunker down” is much older than Georgia football. It goes back to 18th-century Scotland. It referred to when someone squatted down on the balls of their feet. A line of Scottish poetry from 1720 describes “hunk’ring down upon the cald Grass,” which sure sounds like a precursor to playing some red zone defense.

Lyndon Johnson and 'hunker down'

Loran Smith, a part of the Georgia broadcast team for more than 50 years, grew on a cotton farm in Wrightsville, Ga., about 60 miles east of Macon. But the first time he heard the phrase, it came from a Texan in the White House.

“The first time I heard ‘hunkering down’ was from Lyndon Johnson when he was president,” Smith said.

I didn’t know this piece of “hunker down” history. But, sure enough, when facing adversity, Johnson said sometimes the best thing to do was “hunker down like a jackass in a hailstorm.”

This turn of phrase makes me think, among other things, that maybe our 36th president missed his calling. He could’ve been a college football broadcaster.

It was during this era, in 1966, that Larry Munson began broadcasting Georgia football games. Smith recalls that at first Bulldogs fans weren’t thrilled. They missed his predecessor, Ed Thilenius.

“Thilenius had this deep, resonating voice that I’ve said many times sounded like he swallowed Walter Cronkite,” Smith said. “Munson wasn’t very popular in the beginning because he had a different voice. … But he had a gift for radio. And he became so popular because of his dramatic style.”

Today it’s hard to fathom that Munson ever wasn’t beloved in Georgia. Even more than a decade after his death that voice lives on, his calls still being replayed. And while there may be more famous ones – from “Run, Lindsay!” against Florida in 1980 to the "hobnail boot" against Tennessee in 2001 – none has cemented a phrase to the program quite like “hunker down” against Auburn on Nov. 13, 1982.

It’s worth noting that this wasn’t the birth of “hunker down” in Bulldog lexicon. Going through old newspaper clippings, I found numerous references to the expression before this, particularly during the 1980 national championship season. That year, one story said, the big song in Athens was “Hunker Down, Hairy Dogs, Hunker Down.”

But it was one thing when a country band sang about hunkering down. It was another when, with a trip to the Sugar Bowl on the line, Larry Munson belted it out through radios all over the state of Georgia.

To understand what happened 40 years ago, Smith says you have to recall that back then most games weren’t on television. Even in that 1980 title run, Georgia wasn’t on TV until it played South Carolina in its eighth game. So everyone listened to Munson’s calls on the radio. Even if the game was on television, or they were sitting in the stadium, they often still listened to the radio.

Near the end of that Auburn game, people were on the edge of seats all over the state. Georgia had a five-point lead. But Auburn, led by Bo Jackson, was moving down the field.

That’s when Munson first used the expression now forever linked to him.

A 1984 column written by the Atlanta Journal Constitution's Dave Kindred quotes Munson saying: “I’d never said it before, never used it any way. But Auburn came to a first down inside the 20 and I said, ‘Hunker down, you guys.’ I’m superstitious. So I said it again on second down and third down. And on fourth down, I said, ‘Hunker down, you guys and I’ll never ask you to hunker down again.’”

The defense did. The Bulldogs won. Munson shouted about sugar falling from the sky. And “hunker down” became even more a part of Bulldog lore.

At the start of this year, when Georgia played for another national title, the governor of Georgia cited that call and declared it “Hunker Down Day.”

The current voice of the Bulldogs

Scott Howard was a student at Georgia from 1980 to 1984. He remembers “Hunker Down” t-shirts and bumper stickers being sold in Athens. He bought a few of them.

“I had heard my parents use the expression ‘hunker down’ when I was growing up but never really thought much about it,” he said. “When Larry said it on the air, the phrase just seemed to fit what Bulldogs do…get ready for a fight, protect your ground, don’t be bullied…that sort of thing. Georgia fans ate it up.”

Howard’s perspective on this is particularly relevant — because he now is calling Georgia football games on the radio.

He’s been a part of the broadcast team for nearly 30 years. In 2007, when Munson’s declining health limited him to doing home games, Howard started calling the road games. The next year he took over home and road games. So he’s been doing it 15 years. And Georgia broadcasts still include replays of Munson’s calls.

This is something that Smith mentions about Howard.

“How many people would be as unflappable about having the calls of their predecessor played over and over again?” he said.

Smith praises Howard for having his own style and way with words. (To my chagrin, he points to Howard’s call of a Georgia touchdown against Missouri as an example.)

And here’s the interesting thing, 40 years after Munson’s call you can turn on your TV and see everyone from network anchors to governors talking about hunkering down during a storm. But you probably won’t turn on your radio and hear the Georgia play-by-play announcer use that expression during a football game.

“I don’t use it on air, as far as I know,” Howard said. “In a 10-hour broadcast and a 3½-hour game, a lot is said. I’m quite certain ‘hunker down’ has been used during our broadcasts but probably not by me.”

He said he’ll leave that one to Larry Munson.

mwoods@jacksonville.com

(904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Hunker down: 2 words that Georgia football, Florida hurricanes share